Two years ago Oxford University neuroscientist Prof. Dorothy Bishop established the Orwellian Prize for Journalistic Misrepresentation for the worst misrepresentation of a scientific article in a national newspaper, judged according to the number of factual errors in the piece.

This year, my nomination of the Daily Mail’s article “Just ONE cannabis joint ‘can bring on schizophrenia’ as well as damaging memory”won the award! The prize, normally reserved for the journalist authoring the piece, was awarded to Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, because of the number of errors in the headline which is the responsibility of the editor and is normally not written by the journalist writing the piece.

The story doesn’t end there. Despite detailed complaints to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) (1) (2), the article hasn’t been corrected and the PCC have categorically refused to look at the case. Incidentally, in arguably the greatest conflict of interest in the history of conflicts of interests, the Dail Mail’s editor Paul Dacre is also chairman of the PCC Editors’ Code of Practice Committee.

This allows the Daily Fail to continue to spew out complete nonsense without risk of reprisals, only last week publishing a piece misappropriating a death to cannabis, that the coroner explicitly stated was not due to cannabis.

Professor David Nutt is a qualified Psychiatrist, Psychopharmacologist, researcher, and famously, the former chief government drugs advisor sacked for giving a lecture. In this (never before filmed) lecture, recorded at the end of last year at Oxford university, David covers the material in the lecture for which he was censured and describes recent findings that confirm all of his original statements.

Unfortunately Oxford University have censored some slides “for copyright reasons”. This is pretty regressive to say the least because the slides are clearly covered under the principles of fair use and criticism (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988). I’d expect Oxford University to stand up for this principle in an academic context, particularly because most of the censored material is David’s own work (although publishers hold the copyright). Not to worry though, I’m prepared to stand up for this principle and have included the key censored material (or an artists impression) and more importantly, the censored references below. (To be updated as more information becomes available)

Live Update: 27/01/20 (02.17)

Prof. Nutt has replied that Oxford University were authorised to censor slides of celebrities.

@neurobonkers @deevybee Just a couple of photos of celebs that hadn’t been cleared. OU haven’t censored me!

My reply: It appears that much more than that has been censored, I have listed timestamps below. Some of the data slides are very clearly digitally smeared after the event. I guess there’s an outside chance that some of the other blurred and overexposed data slides are due to very bad camera work but the scale of the slides affected seems to suggest that the cameraman has been instructed to blur slides containing data or citations. Apart from the segments affected, the majority of text is displayed in high clarity even when wide camera angles are being used.

NB: I’m not suggesting malintent, it appears that copyright fears are out of hand, to the point that from the video it’s impossible to determine the source or even the nature of the majority of citations. As the youtube comments make clear this is a pretty big deal for public viewers who even if they can track down the source themselves, can’t view journal papers without a subscription – nowadays normally approaching thousands of pounds for a basic sub. Without a sub, non-academics and third world academics are typically looking at £20 plus a day for 24 hours DRM restricted use of a singe article, on a single computer.

By the way, a massive thanks is due once again for all of your hard work, especially taking so much time to deliver public talks and for making so much of your work available without a paywall, a near impossible feat for todays researchers it now seems.

Censored Material (To be updated as more information becomes available):

“I ask the Government not to return to retribution and war on drugs. That has been tried, and we all know that it does not work”

Editorial team (2010). The EMCDDA annual report 2010: the state of the drugs problem in Europe. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, also published in Euro surveillance :European communicable disease bulletin, 15 (46) PMID: 21144426 (PDF)

In today’s edition the Daily Mail responds to this week’s debate on drugs with what can only be described as a juvenile and fraudulent argument.

To sum up the past couple of days:

Nature, Time, the BBC and just about every other science publication and news outlet covered Dr. Nutt’s latest research and it’s promising findings for possible clinical use of psilocybin, provoking academic debate on the restriction on study of illegal drugs for clinical use.

The legal developments are based on evidence emerging from states such as Portugal who have successfully decriminalised drug use and are reaping the benefits (rigorous, balanced analysis of the stats here).

So what did the Daily Mail run with today? This time my commentary is not even needed. I’ve simply taken the liberty of literally highlighting the blindingly obvious flaw in this ridiculous excuse for a news article.

In case you somehow missed the staggering (excuse the pun) error. The coroners verdict was death by “misadventure”, the coroner explicitly stated that cannabis wasn’t the direct cause of death and instead implicated the popular legal alternative, alcohol.

Is this really the best that the pro-drugs-war camp can offer? This, against all of the evidence. This scrap of blatant deception, in defence of a policy that causes untold misery, death, unnecessary incarceration, spread of disease, incentive for crime, currency for criminals, violence at home and abroad, the list goes on.

Make your complaint with the Press Complaints Commission about this piece here. Receive updates on Daily Mail pieces particularly in need of demolition here.

Reference (A word the Daily Mail apparently do not know the meaning of)

If you haven’t spent the last decade living in a cave then you will have witnessed the recent explosion in “infographics” that are overtaking every corner of the internet. This is partially due to rapid developments that have recently occurred in the field of data visualisation.

Via visual.ly (click for animation)

Today we see bog standard infographics absolutely everywhere, but what many don’t realise is that to create high end interactive data visualisations you do not necessarily need a team of professional artists and coding wizards. An array of free tools are now available for you to try your hand at data visualisation yourself without the need to get down and dirty with any code.

Before proceeding I should note that there has been an upsurge of bad infographics recently, so if you are going to make an infographic first make sure you do the three essentials:

Bad infographics Venn diagram (Guardian)

Verify the source of the stats.

Check that the type of visualisation you are using is appropriate.

Make sure that you really do understand the numbers.

If there is anything that the internet does not need more of it is bad infographics…

Kirk has recently announced a new international tour of training courses following a very well received previous series. I’ll be attending the Bristol class and working on my skills myself in the mean time, so hopefully you can look forward to a significantly higher standard of data visualisations on Neurobonkers in the near future!

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